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The Full Gospel

Sermon by Byron Klaus
Women in Ministry Conference
Springfield, Missouri
Friday, March 12, 2004

I am grateful to Beth and to her team for asking me to be here this morning. I’m a member of the majority group in the Assemblies of God. That is—a preacher, Anglo man over middle age and very overweight. I recently talked to my mom who is 85 years old and was credentialed with the Assemblies of God in 1937. I thought she would be really proud of her son. I said, “Mom, you won’t believe this. They invited me to speak at the women’s conference.” She said to me, “Son, why do they want men speaking?” So that is part of the story.

It would be easy for me to stand here this morning and patronize you—to say, “When we all pull together how happy we’ll be.” It would be easy for me to placate you. I could stand here and I could say, “You know what, we actually have district presbyters who are women now.” For about two seconds that would impress you and you would say, “How many did you say?”

We live in uneven times. We are living in times in which there is unprecedented opportunity for men and for women. But we live in a time in which there are huge challenges to the full participation of all of the Body of Christ and to what He has called us to become. Our heritage is a heritage which some at the beginning of our history called the “full gospel”. They used that as a descriptor term—a term that sort of talked about the fact that they had moved into new dimensions of understanding—the clarity of what God was up to. They used words like “latter rain.” They used words like “apostolic faith.” All of these words were descriptors of a language of recovery. A language of discovery. There was this glorious encounter with the Lord that was exemplified in a new understanding of Jesus Christ that had been theirs.

David Grant, Jim Bradford, and I just returned from India. I preached last Sunday in a church in Bangalore, India called Full Gospel Assemblies of God. There the pastor, along with thousands of people that I preached to that morning, talked about just returning from Sri Lanka where God is doing incredible things, but there are unbelievable oppositions. Dozens of churches have been destroyed, pastors are being killed. In some of these situations where pastors are being killed, wives are having to fill the pastoral role in these uncertain circumstances. I helped the staff of one of these churches as we gave 20-pound bags of rice and lentils to the widows of the church that morning. Before the time to preach, I had already hauled a ton of rice over to 100 widows. That is the full gospel! It is a gospel that believes that darkness can be pushed back. It believes as James says, “Pure religion is caring for the widows and the orphans.”

My question to you this morning is: “How do we continue to plumb the depths of the full gospel?” There is a portion of Scripture in Revelation chapter 3:1-3. It is the warning that Jesus gives through John to the church at Sardis, and it reads this way, “To the angel of the church in Sardis write: These are the words of him who holds the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die for I have not found your deeds complete in the sight of my God. Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard: obey it, and repent. But if you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what time I will come to you.”

How do we plumb the depths of the full gospel? I think that message to the church at Sardis is a message that all of us who are part of the Pentecostal family ought to take up and listen to. We have a reputation of being alive; and if you spend about two hours with us, you may find out that we are quite exuberant. But the question is, “Are we still alive?” The word to the church at Sardis was: “You know you only have a little bit of time here before folks find out the shallowness of that exuberance and they really begin to see the depths of how you understand the full gospel. So it’s time to wake up and shake that stuff that has yet not died (my paraphrase).”

I’m here to tell you this morning that part of that is making sure that we do not allow difficult texts in the New Testament, although necessary to interpret, to be a roadblock to the fullest expression of every person saved and baptized in the Spirit to continue to plumb the depths of the full gospel. I know that those texts are there, and I’ll suggest what I’d like you to do. Any man or woman that has difficulty with those texts, go out in the hallway and get Debbie Gill and Barbara Caveness’ book. If that doesn’t settle it, get Debbie’s tapes and then move on. We cannot remove the requirements of the full gospel. There are certain genuine texts which we must interpret and live by. You know what? I suggest to you that we look at the larger framework of the gospel that is in the New Testament. That full gospel, that broad frame, the main things that are the plain things and the plain things that are the main things. There are larger themes in the biblical texts that we must understand if we are going to move forward in fullness together as brothers and sisters in the Lord. I am suggesting to you this morning that those texts of difficulty, which Debbie and Barbara have dealt with— we need to move on. They are not enough to stop us from full participation in what God is up to in this world—the depths of the full gospel.

So you say you are full gospel? Well, our early forbears had a way of putting that. They really sort of summarized the full gospel in a four-point sermon that they preached on a regular basis. They might have called it the gospel four squared. Now some would suggest that Aimee Semple McPherson thought that up; no, she stole it from A.B. Simpson. You know, Sister Aimee was a pretty good publicist and she certainly started her organization around that, but it wasn’t her idea, she just did well with the outline. Now I would like to use that this morning to ask you certain questions about whether you really believe and will live in the full gospel.

Redemption

The first word I’d like to look at is redemption. Colossians 2:15 gives us a picture of a triumph. This triumph was put together in Roman army terms so they would understand the victory of a particular general, and of course, Paul suggests that at the cross there has been a victory that all of eternity saw. All challengers had given it their best shot, but on the cross, Jesus Christ took them all and whipped them hands down. In that we have moved into a dimension of power that is necessary to break down the foothold and the stranglehold that the defeated forces still have on this world, but it’s already defeated.

We could go on to Galatians chapter three. We read that there is no male or female, slave or free, Jew or gentile. Now does that mean that upon receiving Jesus Christ we somehow lose our identity as human beings? Absolutely not! Paul is saying that redemption moves farther than simply a ticket to heaven. Redemption actually reframes the way in which people relate to one another. The humanly devised ways in which we keep people separated—gender, ethnicity, class—all those things which we have used to keep people from God or give ourselves an inside track to God are not part of redemption nor kingdom rule. In fact, what has occurred is that those things have been removed and replaced by the righteousness which God has given every person who names the name of Jesus Christ as Lord.

Then we have in 1 Peter 2: 1-10 a wonderful picture that Peter gives us of the people of God. He uses all kinds of imagery which has been moving all the way through the Old Testament from Exodus and Isaiah and Deuteronomy to give us a picture of this people that God has been creating for His name. Finally He says, “You are a people.” Once you did not belong to God, but now you are a people belonging to God so that you may declare that God has given you a purpose that has brought you out of darkness and into light.

Now where does it say in any of these texts that there is not full participation in redemption? Is there a salvation for women and a salvation for men? I think not! The full gospel has empowered people to be set free. When you are abundantly pardoned and saved to the uttermost, God is not looking at gender. He has come to recreate a whole new way of relating between human beings. And while gender and ethnicity and class are all part of the life they live, they are part of the conundrum we live in and sometimes it’s painful. The fact is, in the Kingdom there is a whole new way of relating. That is the redemption that God has come to give us. Jesus is our Savior!

That was the word of our early forbearers, men and women who preached this gospel, who believed as they penetrated these cities that God would go with them. That divine redemption that Jesus brings also brings a call into men’s and women’s lives. It is a divine intrusion. I spoke to my mother growing up. I grew up in a church where my dad preached in the morning; my mom preached at night. I grew up in a church where every marquee of every church they ever pastored listed my mom as co-pastor. I grew up thinking that my mom was a hero. I said, “Mom, how could you go preach in those mountain communities in Colorado? How could you go preach in cattle sale barns in between the pigs and the cows? How is it that you could go all up and down from highway 101 from Paso Robles all the way down to Santa Barbara and evangelize those towns?” She said, “You know what—God called me; what could I do?”

There are young ladies here this morning. I have worked in Assemblies of God education for 25 years, and I am telling you that the brightest stars of the present for the future are ladies. They stand in pulpits with confidence. They articulate the Word of God with maturity. This is not about feminism. This is about call! This is about the handmaidens of the Lord being brought into this day and age.

Do you see the dilemma? The dilemma is that God is raising up not only young men, but young women. He is actually pouring out His Spirit on people. How dare we be poor stewards of what God is ordaining? How dare we look into the future and not include into the equations these people that God is gifting? I’m telling you, there are young warrior women. I’ve seen them around this world. They are going to places that, like my mom said, men wouldn’t go; they would be scared. It’s true! Redemption knows no limits. And that redemption that knows no limits, knows no limits on the demand to grow up and follow in the likeness of Jesus Christ and be obedient regardless of gender. Jesus is the Savior.

Pentecost

We also believe in Pentecost. Pentecost is the guarantee that Jesus, whose ministry is authoritatively recorded in the Gospels, is the Jesus who by the power of the Spirit is doing exactly the same things He did 2,000 years ago. That’s what the book of Acts is about. It’s about Luke telling us what Jesus did when He was on this earth, and He’s continuing to do today by the power of the Spirit. You and I live in that story and we live in that tradition. That Spirit presents and pushes us toward the redemptive agenda of Jesus Christ—this empowerment at Pentecost that we see in Acts 1:6-8, “You will receive power after that the Holy Ghost has come upon you.” Now what are you going to receive that power for? To feel good? To yell loud? To jump high?

You know, you disconnect the empowerment of the baptism of the Spirit from its impetus to send us to the four corners of this earth, and you have nothing but short-circuited power. The baptism of the Spirit with the initial evidence of speaking in tongues is not about some experience that stands by itself. It is connected to the empowerment of the redemptive mission of Jesus Christ, and there are no gender exclusions on anything like that. We are focused on eternal purposes.

Here is how Alice Luce—that wonderful, wonderful early Pentecostal leader talks about her baptism of the Spirit. She said,

“Never can I forget what the receiving of the latter-rain outpouring of the Spirit meant to me. I was far away in the north of India, having been there a good many years, and only knowing by hearsay how God was pouring out His Spirit in the United States and other western lands. He had been awakening a great hunger and thirst in me for more of himself, and dealing with me in a special way for months. He was humbling, searching and breaking me down lower and yet lower at His feet. As when the Spirit came in the fullness on the day of Pentecost, it seemed to me as if He took me by the hand and lead me into the very heart of God the Father to show me how he was rejoicing over Jesus, the son of His love. It was as if every step in the Christian life was a new vision of Jesus. Then it was from the point of view of the heart of God where the Holy Spirit had told me I had now come to abide.” Alice Luce wrote that about 1910 in the north of India.

We not only believe that Jesus is the Savior, we believe that Jesus is the Baptizer. We believe that He is the one who empowers; He releases; He convinces; He gives creative power. How is it that more than 52 percent of all people who have left the United States in foreign missionary service since 1793 have been women? Is this just an anomaly? Did they just get it wrong? I’ll tell you my friends: they heard, they obeyed. How can we tell the story of China and what is going on there without the prayer ladies who lead the groups? How can we tell mission history without stories like the preponderance of women missionaries that are flowing out of places like Singapore? Certainly this cannot be a place where the Kingdom somehow places gender restriction. How could this be in this day and age?

Healing

Then we believe in healing. We believe there is a restoration to completeness. We believe there is a dominion over the challenges to our wholeness, particularly with that Isaiah text. From Isaiah 53, we believe that God cares about the concrete situations of life. Healing is not about abstraction. Healing is about the fact that Jesus bore our sorrows and our illness with every flip and fling of that whip, with His flesh being torn off and His blood bare in that concrete moment in history. All of those things that stand in the way of wholeness were dealt with.

Listen to this. This is a great—this is a 1938 best seller for the Gospel Publishing House (GPH) by Lilian B. Yeomans called The Royal Road to Healthville. She said, “I was dying the morphine death 40 years ago and had nothing to do but to look forward to my funeral, and not much of one at that. No one could help me but God, and at last I found the way to Him. It was just the same old path that Abimelech trod, repentance and of faith in the Lamb of God, and it brought the same results. It never fails.” Lilian Yeomans understood. She was dying a morphine death, but Jesus did not fail her. Then there was on this page—I wanted you to see this. It’s an illustration. You see a man standing over another man there and the caption on the front says, “Infra-red Calvary Rays.” The Scripture there is, “He sent his word and healed them” Psalm 107:20).

I believe in healing. I believe in fact that we get to ask a God who has already told us that wholeness is what we’ve been made for. It is in Jesus Christ and what He has done that it is our privilege to pray. And one day, though things may get a little bit mixed up in this in-between time, we’re going to be whole. We are going to walk where we cannot walk now. We are going to be free of pain where pain may be our experience now. We know that He is the Healer.

The one who has born our infirmities is also the one who understands the malady that is pandemic in the world today. I speak very carefully about this. But I believe that if we are going to plumb the depths of the full gospel, we have got to believe that somehow, someway the pandemic misuse and abuse of women in this world is an opportunity for Pentecostal men and women to move in and declare, “Enough is enough.” I stand here in the Bible belt, in the buckle of the Bible belt, knowing that in Greene County the abuse level is twice that of the state of Missouri, which is much higher than the national average. We could stand here and talk all about the sexual trafficking tragedy all over Southern Asia. But I’m here to tell you that we have overlooked something in our churches that is pandemic. I stand here clearly saying to you that it is time for Pentecostals to stand up and say that Jesus is the healer of the dysfunction that has caused this anger and this rage. The tragedy and codependence that have been the experience of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries need to be confronted in the name of Jesus Christ.

Are we full gospel or not? You say you believe in healing. It’s not just about your ingrown toenail. It is about single moms who are trying to stay alive. Do we believe that the baptism of the Holy Spirit sends us not only to places that have not yet heard the gospel, but to people that have heard the gospel time and time and time again, who know how to quote Scripture and still beat and abuse and hammer. God help us to believe in the full gospel! Jesus is our healer.

Kingdom

And then the word kingdom is one of those that I love. This is the reign of God that demonstrates His triumph over created things. It’s in the Church that we need to see the most visible representation of what the full gospel may look like in redemption and reconciliation between people because we’ve been reconciled to God. It’s in praying and believing in the power of the Spirit to set people free—to heal them, and to enable them to live life as if they are actually transformed.

Second Corinthians 5:20 says, “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors as though God were making his appeal through us.” I would ask you this morning, “What kind of appeal is your local church making to your community when the community wants to know what you’re all about? Can they say what you are really about? What kind of appeal are you making to those people around you?”

I’ve got another wonderful quote here. This is by Bishop Lillian Sparks from the Mt. Sinai Holy church of the American Black Holiness Pentecostal group in Pensacola, Florida, 1934. Here is a poem God gave her.

You’ll wish you had let women alone when they were trying to teach,
You’ll be sorry you tried to hold them down when God told them to preach.
Come dear brothers let us journey side by side and hand in hand,
Does not the Bible plainly tell you woman shall coordinate the man?
The hand that rocks the cradle will rule the world you know,
So lift the standard high for God wherever you may go.”

The picture Bishop Sparks is talking about here is a picture of a day that is coming and a day that she wants to move toward. She doesn’t want to wait until Jesus shows up on the scene to act like the future that has already come, present in Jesus Christ and the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Jesus says He is the soon-coming king! In the middle of a world that is tenuous and in the middle of a world that is uneven, is it asking too much for the people of the full gospel to actually exemplify here and now by the signposts we paint to the world around us that there is a future coming and here’s a glimpse of what it looks like? That is what Bishop Sparks was talking about. Together, hand in hand, let’s journey.

The watchword for the full gospel is a word that comes from Peter. His observation on the day of Pentecost was simply, “This is that.” This which I’ve been experiencing is what the Bible has been speaking about. We Pentecostals have done this all along. We studied the Bible, God sovereignly poured out his Spirit, and all you could hear these early Pentecostals say was, “Bible times are here again. The deaf hear, the blind see, the lame walk.” Why? Because their experience matched what they read in the Bible. Is it any wonder that Peter says on this day, “These aren’t drunk as you suppose, but this is connected to that (my paraphrase).” It was prophesied by Moses in Numbers 11 when he was frustrated about all of the guys who wanted to prophesy. Do you know what? These guys didn’t go through prophet school. They weren’t able to prophesy. Moses said, “I just wish the Spirit of God would fall on the whole lot of you (my paraphrase).” Now you know what he’s probably talking about—men. He wasn’t including women at that point. But I’ll tell you what Joel did. Joel included sons and daughters, young and old—all those categories that we use to designate ourselves; those are the categories that comprise all flesh.

So we have grown up in a family that believes that when something happens among us we should drive ourselves back to the Bible to make sure it lines up. That’s why we’ve had Jericho marches. We saw in the Bible that Jericho was a place where God showed himself, so we decided we were going to participate in that story too. Have you ever done that? We thought that if we could just be part of that story—if God could do it for the folks in Jericho, He could do it for us too! I was at a church the other day. I won’t say where it was, but this church had wide aisles—really wide aisles. I was standing on the platform and all of a sudden I saw this person run right by me. They were running circles around that church. Now I’ve heard of that, but I hadn’t seen it before. But I’ll tell you, it was one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen, and here’s why. I saw men carrying their two-year-old boys and women carrying their two-year-old girls. They were running around that church demonstrating their participation in the glorious triumph of God. What a wonderful heritage for a two-year-old to know life just sort of caught up in the presence of God—participating in the story. What we’re doing here is connected to that! That glorious day of Pentecost where we were empowered, where the power came on all flesh and we’re just sort of demonstrating that we want to be a part.

I suggest that it is time for us, if we are going to be full gospel, to reconsider that “this is that.” I told you about the young ladies that I see every year at colleges all over this nation and at the seminar, who know that they are going to have to swim upstream. They’re like my mom—they give the same answer as my mom. I’m not hearing from young ladies, “Well we deserve this.” I’m hearing, “God called me.” I don’t know all the answers to how that occurs. I just know that if we are going to say we believe in the full gospel then we must believe what God is doing among us today. Calling women to great exploits for God needs to be connected to that. That is, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8-NIV). I see no gender exclusion in that text! It’s on all flesh!

Are we going to be full gospel? Are we going to believe that God is sovereignly doing things in this day that we cannot disavow? The names of Minnie Abrams and Alice Luce and Lillian Thrasher and Carrie Judd Montgomery and Maria Woodworth Etter, and Aimee Semple McPherson. Are all of these just blips on the historical screen? Are these just anomalies? Are these just parenthetical? No, they are testimony to what God is doing—connected to that which He began before the foundations of the earth.

Here is what my friend Janet Everts Powers said, “Early Pentecostals sensed that in Spirit baptism the status of women had changed. Before Pentecost a woman could only go into the court of women and not into the inner court. The anointing oil was never poured on the woman’s head, but only on the heads of kings, priests and prophets. But when the Lord poured out Pentecost, He brought all those faithful women with the other disciples into the upper room, and God baptized them all in the same room and made no difference. All the women received the anointing oil of the Holy Spirit and were able to preach the same as men.”

I’m not here this morning to champion equality. Equality is a word defined by culture and democracy. It is a scarcity word. There is never enough. I am here to champion righteousness. Righteousness is a common experience that every one of us in this room has had by the initiative of God and there is no lack of His grace among us.

I come to you this morning aware of the uneven times that we live in, but believing that if we are going to be the people of the full gospel then we had better begin plumbing new depths and new breadths of what it truly means to be people who call themselves Pentecostal.

Prayer:

Lord Jesus I thank you for this opportunity to meet with sisters, handmaidens of the Lord. Sisters you have called, sisters you have abundantly pardoned and saved to the uttermost. Sisters who you have called to sacrificial ministries to be unsung heroes who have responded many times with grace when there has been no grace extended to them. I pray oh God in the halting words of this preacher who has come this morning that you would remind my sisters that the call is greater than the challenge and that to be people of the full gospel is a heritage worth plumbing. And I pray oh God that from this moment you would energize folks with confidence, because you are the Jesus Christ who is the Savior, Baptizer, Healer and Soon Coming King. Amen.

 

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